Martin (1992: 1):
English Text is an introduction to discourse analysis within the framework of systemic functional linguistics. Its aim is to provide a comprehensive set of discourse analyses which can be used to relate any English text to the context in which it is used. Readers familiar with Halliday and Hasan's seminal Cohesion in English will find in English Text an elaboration of their work, in ways that have been influenced by Gleason's stratificational approach to discourse structure (Gutwinski 1976:36-63) and by almost 20 years of research by systemic linguists since Cohesion in English was first circulated in manuscript form.
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[1] To be clear, within the framework of Systemic Functional linguistics, it is the grammar that provides the means of analysing discourse. Halliday (1985: xvi-xvii, 345):
The current preoccupation is with discourse analysis, or 'text linguistics'; and it has sometimes been assumed that this can be carried on without grammar — or even that it is somehow an alternative to grammar. But this is an illusion. A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text … the exercise remains a private one in which one explanation is as good or as bad as another.
A text is a semantic unit, not a grammatical one. But meanings are realised through wordings; and without a theory of wordings — that is, a grammar — there is no way of making explicit one's interpretation of the meaning of a text. …
A text is meaningful because it is an actualisation of the potential that constitutes the linguistic system; it is for this reason that the study of discourse (‘text linguistics’) cannot properly be separated from the study of the grammar that lies behind it.
[2] To be clear, readers familiar with Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English will find in English Text Martin's misunderstandings of Halliday and Hasan's seminal work, rebranded as Martin's systems, and incongruously relocated from textual lexicogrammar to textual, logical and experiential semantics, as the analyses on this blog demonstrate.
